Perfect – Right out of the camera

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I’m of the view that when you take a photography, it is not complete until you have edited it to some degree. However, there are the rare occasions where you look at the photo on the back of the display and it looks exactly how you wish – exposure, composition, highlights and shadows. This is an extreme rarity (for me at least) but when it occurs, its almost ‘magical’.

Recently, I was changing memory cards and before formatting, I was scrolling through the images and stopped at such a shot that I took of the Eiffel tower in Paris a few years ago and actually still remember at that time looking at the display and thinking – that’s perfect.

Of course we could critique the image, one such criticism could be the visible red and white tape, however when I considered removing it in post, it looked too clean and clinical, the inclusion of the tape reminds me that I took it rather than just one of the thousands of stock photos of the Eiffel tower you can see in a shop or online.

So here is a photo of what I saw on the display that night.

Back of Camera

Looking at the histogram (the small chart at the top right of the display) , it appears to be mainly darks and shadows but thats because it’s a night shot. The histogram is valuable to have a visual representation of the image’s tonal range (from black to white) but this cannot on its own dictate the visual image of an photograph image, for example for this shot, a lack of shadows.

This still remains one of my favourite images for many reasons, the holiday itself, the walk with my girlfriend that night, being in front of the Eiffel Tower but also because when I captured that time, it just looked right.

So remember, the majority of your photos require tweaking in posts but sometimes you’ll come across one that stands as being perfect.